Introduction

The process of colonization is of extreme importance for Honduras since it
competes for forest resources in an economy where wood exports to the United
States represented in 1981 approximately 20 per cent of its GNP (USAID n.d.).
The value of wood lost through deforestation (largely for agricultural purposes)
of broad-leaf forests is estimated by the Ministry of Natural Resources to be
640 million lempiras annually (Honduras 1984a). Honduras has suffered from
periodic flooding of agricultural valleys, the severity of which can be linked
in part to the process of uncontrolled deforestation in upper watershed areas.
At the root of these problems is the combination of poor soils and insecurity of
land tenure, which result in a generalized strategy of shifting cultivation. In
many areas, primary and secondary forest remnants are continually brought into
cultivation within agricultural zones in a process of land conversion that is
not formally recognized as "colonization," but rather as a very long
fallow system. At the other extreme, a well-defined process of new land
colonization is taking place in sparsely populated portions of the country,
where large expanses of primary forest are being incorporated into the
"agricultural frontier." In this chapter, I will focus on these latter
areas, where new land colonization has occurred adjacent to or within major
forested areas.

Population Distribution

While the population density of Honduras is not extremely low by Central
American standards (25 inhabitants/km²), colonization of new lands is a major
feature of the agricultural economy due to the skewed distribution of population
within the country. The population is concentrated in the western and central
parts of the country; only relatively recently has the northern coast
experienced an increase in population, and the three largest departments in the
country, Olancho, Gracias a Diós and Colon, remain sparsely populated (see table
22). The economic centres of the country are still located in a corridor which
runs from the Gulf of Fonseca on the Pacific coast, through Tegucigalpa and
Comayagua, to San Pedro Sula near the Caribbean and including the cities of La
Ceiba and Trujillo in the coastal banana production area. The subsistence
agricultural base for the country has traditionally been the western part of the
country, between the central corridor and the Salvadorean and Guatemalan borders
and including the departments of Copán, Intibucá, Ocotepeque, and Santa Barbara.
Population growth, land degradation, and the competition for land between
subsistence farmers and commercial export producers have resulted in pressures
to move into the low population density areas of the northern and eastern parts
of the country (i.e. Yoro, Olancho, Gracias a Diós, Colon, and El Paráiso).

Table 22. Population density by department, Honduras

Forest

Area

Inhabs.

area

Forest

Department

Households

(km²)

per
km²

(km²)

(%)

Central Region

Atlántida

27,426

4.251

6.45

3,032

71.32

Choluteca

32,930

4.211

7.82

875

20.78

Comayagua

23,362

5,196

4.50

2,424

46.65

Cortés

66,184

3,954

16.74

1,855

46.91

Francisco Morazán

77,393

7,946

9.74

4,186

52.68

Islas de la Bahia

2,785

261

10.67

44

16.86

La Paz

11,375

2,331

4.88

837

35.91

Valle

15.604

1.565

9.97

345

22.04

Western Region

Copán

27.491

3,203

8.58

931

29.07

Intibuca

14,243

3,072

4.64

1,236

40.23

Lempira

22,536

4,290

5.25

1,178

27.46

Ocotepoque

9,308

1,680

5.54

478

28.45

Santa Barbara

32,884

5,115

6.43

1,900

37.15

Eastern Region

Colón

14,271

8,875

1.61

8,706

98.10

El Paraíso

23,713

7,218

3.29

2,350

32.56

Gracias a
Diós

3,369

16,630

0.20

14,033

84.38

Olancho

24,910

24,351

1.02

20,426

83.88

Yoro

33.220

7,939

4.18

5,652

71.19

Total

463,004

112,088

4.13

70,488

62.89

Sources: FAO 1965; Honduras 1978.

The case of Choluteca may be taken as a negative example of the worst-case
scenario involving the process of agricultural expansion. As an area of
relatively good soils and easy access by both sea and land, Choluteca has become
a major commercial agricultural area. Land reform and commercial development
have proceeded with little overall land use planning. Subsistence farmer
populations were displaced by the introduction of higher value export crops into
their agricultural areas (DeWalt et al. 1982; CSUCA 1978). The farmers were
relocated through their own efforts and with the assistance of the Agrarian
Reform Agency to the sloping areas of the upper watersheds which drain into the
Choluteca basin. The result has been a near total deforestation of the area and
a subsequent drying trend in both Choluteca and in Tegucigalpa (Tegucigalpa is
in the area of the head-waters of the Choluteca basin); the drying trend has
been demonstrated most concretely by the disappearance of permanent springs and
watercourses in small-farm agricultural areas, and residents of Tegucigalpa
complain of a mean temperature rise over the past 20 years (Dulin, pers. comm.
1984).

A major factor in the problems of the Choluteca basin relates to
inappropriate farming practices, which rely on burning for weed control and land
preparation and leave barren and easily eroded land at the initiation of the
rainy season. It has been reported that farmers use a "slash-and-mulch''
strategy under certain circumstances in which, instead of burning, brush from
land clearing is left in the field. It is not clear what the scale of this
activity is and whether it is sufficient to reverse current trends (DeWalt et
al. 1982). As an immediate solution to land degradation and associated flooding
of low-lying areas in the Choluteca basin, an expensive watershed management
project has been started for Choluteca (Honduras 1984a), but farmers have
already begun to move, both individually and as whole communities, into forest
areas in search of more fertile lands.

A combination in Choluteca of over-intensification of annual cropping and
commercial pressures pushing grain farmers into areas of poor soils has
encouraged the abandonment of old agricultural lands and the colonization of new
areas. What is especially disturbing is that this process has begun on fairly
good soils; the replication of the process in areas of poorer soils has ominous
implications, since the whole process from clearance to abandonment is likely to
occur much faster.

Land Use Potential

The narrow distribution of good agricultural land is another motivation for
colonization in Honduras. In a country where less than 10 per cent of the soil
is suitable for the intensive production of annual crops, one-third of this land
is found in the valley bottoms of the sparsely populated eastern provinces (see
table 23).

The forest cover gives another indication of the generally poor quality of
Honduran soils. Pine forests cover more than 27,000 km². The forests are
generally located in poor, sandy soils in areas of moist climates or in shallow,
rocky soils in highland areas and are not appropriate for permanent agriculture.
Broad-leaf forests cover 40,000 km², and while these forests indicate better
soils, the agricultural capacity of these soils is limited by the high rainfall
and ambient temperatures which combine to acidify soils and break down organic
matter (FAO 1967).

Table 23. Land use potential, Honduras

Area
(km²)

% Total

Intensive annual crops

8,726.00

7.8

Intensive perennial crops

0.00

0.0

Extensive annual crops

1,494.80

1.3

Extensive perennial crops

8,670.10

7.8

Silvo-pastoral

1,036.80

0.9

Broad-leaf forest

31,895.00

28.6

Mangroves

1,450.20

1.3

Pine forest

28,281.70

25.3

Protection

30,173.30

27.0

Total

111,728.00

100.0

Source: FAO 1967.

Table 24. Land use in forested lands (km²)

Land use category

Sula

Olancho

Aguán

Mosquitia

Nation

Total areaa

16,165

18,367

15,610

21,089

112,088

Deforested

2,678

563

948

0

25,636

Cultivated

1,935

432

749

109

7,187

Cultivable

1,491

1,208

2,983

3,214

10,463

Pasture

3,456

1,002

1,508

131

13,706

Forested

10,062

16,164

10,930

18,492

70,488

Source: Hernandez Paz and Desloges 1982.

aIn the source document, no explanation was given for
inconsistencies in the column entries and column

totals.

Despite the limitations on land use potential, population pressure has led to
massive land conversion of lands with limited production potential for
agricultural purposes. In an analysis of the state of land use in areas of
broad-leaf forests, it was concluded that more than one-third of the land in
these areas was now being used for agriculture (see table 24). One problem
illustrated by the table is that in parts of Honduras, the potential remains to
increase food production since there is more cultivable land than there is
cultivated land; however, much of this cultivable land is used for pastures.

In the broad-leaf forest region, over 30,000 families have been settled on
138,719 ha through agricultural reform programmes (see table 25). Comparing land
reform in broad-leaf areas to that on a national level, 67 per cent of the
families affected by reform are in the broad-leaf area, as are 71 per cent of
the lands affected.

The exploitation of forest resources is one of the alternatives for economic
development of Honduras, given its difficult soil conditions. The major efforts
for forest industry development have been directed toward the pine forests.
While they represent less than one-half the total area of standing forest and
only one-third the total volume of wood in existence in Honduras (see table 26),
some 98 per cent of all commercial wood production is pine.

In the exploitation of broad-leaf forests, the lack of proper management
techniques constitutes a major problem. Very few species are utilized, and
forest area remaining after cutting is damaged in the logging operations.
According to COHDEFOR (the Honduran Forestry Development Corporation) figures,
11 species make up 94 per cent of all wood exploited in broad-leaf forests
(table 27), with an average of 10 to 15 m³ per hectare exploited. Further, as
mentioned, there is a lack of conservation techniques, so that forest remaining
after logging suffers severe damage (Hernandez and Desloges 1982). Furthermore,
commercial logging focuses on relatively pure, dense stands of commercially
valuable species to reduce production costs, leaving only low-grade forests.
Once access roads have been established by the logging companies, farming
populations follow, completing the destruction of the forest left standing by
the loggers. The loggers argue that their selective logging is not the major
problem with regard to the overall deforestation process, but that it is the
subsequent uncontrolled introduction of small-scale farmers who clear land for
agricultural purposes that represents the most destructive and longest lasting
impact on the forest.

Table 27. Broad-leaf species exploited in Honduras

Species

% Wood
exploited

Mahogany

Swientenia macrophylla

47.5

Cedar

Cedrela
odorata

11.7

Sangre

Virola
koschnyi

8.8

Ceiba

Ceiba
pentandra

6.7

San Juan

6.7

6
other species

12.6

Total

94.0

Source: Hernandez Paz and Desloges 1982.

Table 28. Sistema Social Forestal co-operatives, 1977

No. of groups

Activities

No. of families

92

Pine resin collection

4,236

3

Sweet gum resin collection

40

3

Tuno latex collection

74

21

Pit-sawing

400

Source: USAID 1978.

One of the more intriguing aspects of COHDEFOR's overall programme is the
Sistema Social Forestal (Social Forestry System). In a country with abundant
forests, poor farming potential, and a large unemployed population, the SSF'S
objective of incorporating farmers into forest exploitation is an extremely
attractive concept. Co-operatives have been established for the production of
resins, fuelwood, and lumber (see table 28). However, the establishment of such
co-operatives has been sporadic and inconsistent due to funding constraints and
the limited applicability of this model because of the relatively low income
levels and the logistical limitations of the implementing agency, COHDEFOR.

Institutional Aspects of Colonization

Two Honduran institutions are of major importance in the process of new land
colonization: INA (Instituto Nacional Agrario, or National Agrarian Institute)
and COHDEFOR.

INA. INA is the agency charged with the fundamental aspects of agrarian
reform in Honduras. Its major activities are land adjudication, titling, and the
organization of farmers into co-operative units. The activities of INA are
focused mostly on the lands of the more densely populated regions of the
country, where underutilized lands or remnant forests are adjudicated for
peasant groups (see table 29). In Olancho, the activities of INA have been
directed in part toward forested areas, as land pressures push farmers to look
for new lands. INA'S strategy is built around the maintenance of administrative
and technical ties with asentamientos, to promote their co-operative model and
to give access to technical assistance. A major new programme is the titling of
lands, carried out in coordination with AID. Titling motivates farmers to stay
on a single farm and improve it for their own use and it avoids the tendency of
farmers with insecure title to sell to avoid conflicts with others. The titling
programme has been directed at farming areas of the western part of the country
rather than at areas of colonization.

Ideologically, INA is an agrarian reform agency rather than a colonization
agency. Its activities are oriented toward the improvement of peasants'
abilities to hold on to valuable land in major agricultural areas and to improve
their income and political status through organization. The principal focus of
INA activity has been the Aguán Valley; this area was originally banana
plantation, then abandoned and converted to individual agricultural holdings,
and finally expropriated for land reform. The Aguán Valley is exceptional in
Central America in its relatively successful establishment of co-operative land
holding and agricultural production entities, centring around African oil-palm.
(It should be noted that there are serious criticisms regarding the efficiency
of the investment of national and international funds in the area. INA has been
criticized by some as being a paternalistic national institution which has
become the new "employer" of an agricultural proletariat not unlike
that of the privately owned banana plantations of the same region.) INA has also
been active in other parts of the country, such as Choluteca, but this activity
has focused much more on the redistribution of lands than on the implementation
of the large-scale, complex organization and productive structure which
distinguishes the Aguán Valley.

The incorporation of national lands into agricultural activities is a legal
no man's land in practice. A series of overlapping obligations and
responsibilities hinder the effective implementation of policies even in cases
where it is clearly in the immediate public interest. For example, the
watersheds which generate the potable water supplies for Tegucigalpa and
Juticalpa are being endangered by land clearance. Despite the legal formation of
La Tigra National Park to protect the Tegucigalpa water supply, no institutional
mechanism for preventing the entry of squatters has appeared (Dulin, pers. comm.
1984). In Juticalpa, a small group of 20 squatters invaded the watershed
generating the city's water; INA was called in to remove the squatters, which it
did, but they returned. INA officials are now unwilling to take further action.
They feel that the local authorities are not prepared to make the political
commitment to reinforce INA activities, so that INA must bear an unreasonable
portion of the abuse and ill-feeling which accompanies the removal of the
squatters. It seems clear that the enforcement mechanisms are not sufficiently
well defined to permit the control of land use patterns even in areas of easy
access for government institutions; the possibility of carrying out the
necessary enforcement activities in remote areas with little permanent
government presence would seem to be correspondingly remote.

Despite its limitations, INA remains a crucial element in natural resource
protection. It is the legal mechanism for formalizing land titles over national
lands, i.e. forested lands, for the use of individual farmers or those in a
co-operative. Nevertheless, INA'S first responsibility is to its farmer clients,
and its legalization and establishment of farming communities in forested lands
is a source of friction with institutions concerned with forest conservation and
management.

COHDEFOR. COHDEFOR is required by law to administer all forest lands in
Honduras. It was formed in 1972 to nationalize forestry interests, which had
been controlled by foreign companies and which, it was argued, had led to highly
exploitative management practices and the expatriation of national income.
COHDEFOR was given sweeping powers to regulate all forestry activities, and took
over all phases of the lumber industry, from forest management and production to
marketing.

Since more than half of Honduras is forested, COHDEFOR'S activities bring it
into direct contact with peasant farmers. These contacts have been conflictive
in many cases, where COHDEFOR limits or prohibits certain peasant activities
(see Murray 1981; Jones 1988). As part of the response to these conflicts,
COHDEFOR has instituted a series of programmes under its Sistema Social Forestal
in which peasant farmers associate in agro-forestry groups or co-operatives to
exploit forest resources on a small scale. Three major activities of these
groups are resin tapping (both pine and sweet gum), firewood production, and
hand preparation of tropical hardwoods. Only the last of these is found in the
recent colonization areas of the country; sweet-gum resin-tapping co-operatives
were formed near Culmí and El Carbon in Olancho, but low world prices led to
their abandonment, although some independent commercial tapping is still being
carried out.

A major effort for the management of broad-leaf forest areas has been made by
joint projects of COHDEFOR and ACDI(ACDI is the Spanish acronym for the Canadian
International Development Agency). The oldest of these projects is the
Cooperativa Agroforestal Atlántida Honduras Limitada (COATLAHL), built around
the philosophy that small-scale hand-sawing operations can exploit forest
resources more completely and more economically than large-scale enterprises.
The projects specifically recognize the generation of labour demand by such
activity and include this consideration in many aspects of planning and
execution. The COATLAHL programme began in an effort to utilize wood from trees
which had been felled by Hurricane Fifi on the north coast of Honduras. In the
early years of the project, trees were sawed up and marketed in tablones under
the direction of COHDEFOR. More recently, the use of chain-saws has been
prohibited, since they are wasteful of the raw material (a chain-saw cut may be
1/4" to 1/2" wide), and the increased rate of forest exploitation
threatens to eliminate a source of employment for the cooperative members over
the longer term. The organizational model for this operation is very similar to
that used by other COHDEFOR agro-forestry co-operatives, in which small-scale
operations are licenced and overseen by COHDEFOR but ideally managed in the form
of co-operatives or small-scale businesses.

Unfortunately, the overall tenor of relationships between COHDEFOR and
farmers tends to be negative on nearly all levels. Large landowners come into
conflict with COHDEFOR because of their strategy of "fence creeping,"
by which a legally established property is extended out into national forest
lands simply by moving the fences. Since ground inspections by COHDEFOR are
spotty and infrequent and adjacent squatters cannot usually contest the claims
of the more poweful landowners, this strategy is generally practiced with
impunity. Nevertheless, COHDEFOR is aware of the practice and takes measures to
prevent it, thereby earning the animosity of large ranchers.

In a very general sense, COHDEFOR'S mandate creates conflicts with the
traditional agricultural production strategy of Honduran small farmers. The
general pattern of shifting agriculture and the poor farmers' practice of
producing fuelwood to supplement low incomes are adaptations to very difficult
environmental conditions, under which farmers have managed to make a living from
agriculture, despite the very poor quality of the land. The use of fire for land
clearance and pasture management allows the use of land which cannot generally
be made to produce in an intensive fashion. Since COHDEFOR is charged with the
prevention of forest fires and the control of land clearance, antagonistic
relationships frequently arise between the corporation and farmers.

Finally, COHDEFOR'S legal control over all trees may possibily be the
country's greatest disincentive to reforestation. It is common to hear stories
of farmers who have forests on land they consider their own or even forests
which they have either planted or managed for their own long-term benefit that
are granted by COHDEFOR to a third party as a forestry concession with little or
no remuneration to the farmer. In the end, farmers are very unsure of their
rights to forest on the land they manage. Farmers feel severely constrained in
their land use decisions by what they feel to be unreasonable restrictions on
land clearance, since COHDEFOR generally tries to discourage deforestation for
agriculture and grants permission through a bureaucratic procedure. Surveys of
on-farm tree plantings in agro-forestry combinations found an exceptionally low
incidence on Honduran farms when compared with farms in other Central American
countries (see table 30), suggesting that farmers tended to deforest to avoid
the controls of COHDEFOR.

Despite its ambitions to the contrary, COHDEFOR'S control over forests has a
negative impact on the conservation of forest resources. As in other Central
American countries, Honduran land-holding law is based to a certain extent on a
"homesteading" ethic, according to which individuals who occupy and
work national lands can gain legal control over the land. The general strategy
for establishing control over land is to "unencumber" the land from
competing claims. In practice, this means formally purchasing any
"improvements" made by other occupants of the land and constant
vigilance to ensure that no other farmers occupy and "improve" any
part of the farm. The land "owner," for his or her part, in turn
improves the land by eliminating forest cover, establishing fence lines, and
constructing dwellings and other infrastructure on the farm. The elimination of
forest is a method for avoiding potential competing encumbrances; landless
farmers feel they have the right to cultivate "unimproved" land, and
COHDEFOR can either grant permission to exploit forested land to third parties
or prohibit alterations in the forest cover. Given the low percentage of lands
with clear title, the strategy of eliminating competing encumbrances is a
powerful motivation for deforestation, even though the owner might see economic
benefits in the exploitation of the forest resource.

The outcome of the numerous conflicts between COHDEFOR and farmers is a lack
of farmer interest in forest resources and a carelessness with regard to their
preservation. The lack of understanding on the part of the farmers of COHDEFOR'S
function and goals and the historical condition of Honduras as a country with a
nearly limitless agricultural frontier create a situation of extreme difficulty
for the control of further deforestation and inappropriate land use in the new
agricultural lands.

COHDEFOR'S mandate loses moral force due to cases of corruption of COHDEFOR
officials, which also confirms the farmers' perception of COHDEFOR controls as
an arbitrary limitation of their agricultural activities. COHDEFOR'S
institutional policy of favouring large lumber interests over farmers' interests
creates an extremely negative situation in which farmers look at the evasion of
conservation regulations as a fact of life - farmers have even been reported to
burn forests in retaliation for grievances against COHDEFOR (Murray 1981).

The Ministry of Natural Resources. The Ministry of Natural Resources (MNR)
has a relatively small involvement in colonization at present, although this is
likely to change in the future. The MNR is proposing to manage land in
agricultural areas with innovative projects on a fairly large scale, and has
proposed a large project for the management of the colonization area of Rio
Sico-Río Paulaya.

The management of the Choluteca river basin is a major project, financed by
USAID. The Choluteca river basin is not a colonization area, but the project is
experimenting with methods of incorporating peasant farmers into land management
programmes and promoting improved land management techniques on an individual
level. The motivation for change will be provided by increased land productivity
over the long run and subsidies over the short run.

A proposal for the "Rehabilitation of Principal Watersheds of the
Atlantic Coast" was prepared recently, with the objective of improving
patterns of land use in the watersheds of the eastern Atlantic coast. The
watersheds affected will be those of the Cangrejal, Papaloteca, and Sico rivers,
which are located in the sparsely inhabited areas of eastern Colón. In 1988
financing from the Canadian government set the project under way.